On their latest album “Chariot of the Gods,” the great Australian band Hoodoo Gurus ask the musical question “Ain’t it time to settle down?” The answer, according to frontman Dave Faulkner by phone recently, is: Heck, no.
“The funny thing is that’s the oldest song on the album, I wrote it 20 years ago and it finally found a place in the band,” he says. “So that’s a picture of a much younger man writing about being old and unfashionable and irrelevant – We did another one called “Sell-By Date’ on the same idea. And the answer is that we are proud and confident in what we do, we have the same intentions, we haven’t mellowed or changed our course. Aside from looking older, there’s no difference in us.”
Though their popularity has been steady at home, in the US they’re known mainly for a string of hits — “I Want You Back,” “Bittersweet,” “Come Anytime” — that were as close as ‘80s radio could go to the sound of ‘60s-style garage rock. At the time the band wore its vintage influences proudly. “Everybody starts out being slavish to their influences to some degree,” Faulkner says. “You end up being more of your own thing and trusting your instincts. You stop needing to say, ‘I know this is a good song because it sounds like something else I like’.”
By the time they first hit America, they’d already been around the block in Australia. “It got interesting, because we became a pop phenomenon at home — and that wasn’t cool with the scene we came from, you weren’t supposed to have a hit. Then in the States we were called an underground band, so that gave us a very cool sort of following.”
The US hits stopped coming around 1989 when they released a single called “Axegrinder,” which featured a much heavier guitar-driven sound — the very sound that was all the rage when the grunge era hit soon afterward. “We’d just done ‘What’s My Scene,’ which turned out to be our biggest hit in America, but that one sounded too ‘80s to us — We had a producer foisted on us who put on those big snare drums, and we swore that would never happen again. So the next album was kind of our pre-grunge album, but we were really just trying to capture how we sounded onstage. And suddenly radio got scared of us; it’s like we’d done something offensive because ‘Axegrinder’ wasn’t a happy pop song. Two years later Nirvana was pronounced acceptable, but when we did it, it was, ‘How dare you!’”
That song isn’t in their current setlist, but they are going deep with singles and album tracks. Their show at the Royale this Saturday has been a long time coming: They were set to come over in 2020, postponed the tour due to COVID, then cancelled it altogether and started fresh.
Prior to that, the band reunited in 2003 after six years apart. “We quit on a high and we were serious about stopping, but four years later I was saying ‘What the hell have we done?’ I was afraid people would think we were like Kiss doing endless farewell tours. But it felt more like we’d kept the band chained in a basement and finally let it out. Right now we’re touring like we haven’t done since the ‘90s — sleeping on the bus a lot, which is challenging for dudes like us.”